Since Flashbuilder does not support WCF over https, i am considering to use weborb remoting as alternative, but not really sure how flash is going to know weborb location, if they are sitting on different servers. Looked at destination, source fields, but not really find a field called url in remoteObject in Flex. Has anyone done similar things?
I know this is an old question, but thought I'd answer it anyway. You can expose your WCF services to remoting clients (Flash, Flex) via WebORB. WebORB supports both self-host and IIS-hosted WCF services. Here are links to instructions for both models.
Self-hosted: http://www.themidnightcoders.com/fileadmin/docs/dotnet/v4/guide/index.html?standalone_wcf_services.htm
IIS-hosted: http://www.themidnightcoders.com/fileadmin/docs/dotnet/v4/guide/index.html?iis_hosted_wcf_services.htm
Both documents address your questions. Here is an example of one approach:
Invoking Self-Hosted Service From Flex/AIR
Flex and AIR clients can use the RemoteObject API to invoke methods on self-hosted WCF services which use the AMF endpoint. There are two approaches for invoking self-hosted WCF service. The first approach requires less code, but creates a dependency on configuration files declaring destinations and channels (the files located in WEB-INF/flex). The second approach does not have any dependencies on the configuration files, but results in a few additional lines of code.Consider the examples of the API below:
Approach 1 (with dependency on configuration files):
var remoteObject:RemoteObject = new RemoteObject("GenericDestination");
remoteObject.endpoint = "http://localhost:8000/WCFAMFExample/amf"
remoteObject.GetQuote.addEventListener( ResultEvent.RESULT, gotResult );
remoteObject.GetQuote.addEventListener( FaultEvent.FAULT, gotError );
remoteObject.GetQuote( "name" );
The endpoint URL uniquely identifies the WCF service. Notice the /amf at the end of the URL, it is required for the AMF endpoint. With the approach demonstrated above, the destination name in the RemoteObject constructor is required however it is not used. As a result, for the code to work, the Flex/AIR application must be compiled with additional compile argument:
-services "C:\Program Files\WebORB for .NET\4.0\web-inf\flex\services-config.xml"
I hope this helps.
K
Related
In an application .Net XCC being used to make communication with marklogic module database to execute module, function and adhoc queries etc.
I want to replace the same XCC calls with REST calls so that we can run application in marklogic 9 as .Net XCC has been deprecated in Marklogic 9.
I have tried in built rest api in marklogic. It only allows to execute module exiting in module database.
Is there any online source stuffs available or anything that could help us.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
ArvindKr
There is /v1/invoke to invoke modules in the modules database attached to the REST app-server you are addressing, but also /v1/eval that allows running ad hoc queries.
HTH!
If you're going to replace XCC.NET with RESTful calls, try out XQRS, it allows you to build services in XQuery in a manner similar to JAX-RS for Java.
I only consider the following for cases such as yours, where compatibility with legacy code is useful or required and where other options are exausted. This is not an elegant approach, but it may be useful in special cases.
The XDBC protocol (which is what XCC uses) is supported natively on the exactly same app servers and ports which the REST API is exposed. You can see this on port 8000 in a default install. The server literally cannot tell a 'REST Application' and an 'XCC Application' apart except by the URI requested in the request (and in some cases additional headers like cookies). REST and XDBC are both HTTP based, and at the HTTP layer are very similar to the extent that they can share the same ports and configurations.
XDBC is 'passed through' the REST processing via the XML Rewriter. XDBC uses /eval and /invoke while REST uses /v1/eval and /vi/invoke. If you look at the default rewriter.xml for port 8000 you can see how the routing is made. While the XDBC protocol is not formally published its not difficult to 'reverse engineer' by looking at the XCC code (public java source) and the rewriter. For example its not difficult to construct URL and payload data to do a basic eval or invoke call. You should be able to replicate existing XCC.NET client behaviour exactly by using the /eval and /invoke endpoints (look for the xdbc attribute set in the rewriter.xml, this causes the request handling to use pure XDBC protocol and behaviour.
Another alternative, if you cannot solve the external variables problem is to write new 'REST Friendly' apis that then xdmp:invoke() on the legacy APIS passing in the appropriate namespaces. An option is to put the legacy code in an entirely seperate modules DB and then replicate the module URIs exactly with the new code. If you don't need to maintain co-existing versions then you modify the old code to remove the namespaces from the parameters or assign local variable aliases.
I'm reading the OWIN 1.0 spec at http://owin.org/spec/owin-1.0.0.html and just can't wrap my head around how it works. I've downloaded Katana source, but that's huge and didn't help any. I'm familiar with the somewhat standard way of having a project/assembly with interfaces only, which allows to integrate two projects without direct regencies. But I can't understand how the web server will call into the web app with only Func<> and Action<> definitions.
OWIN boils down to two things:
1) an "environment" dictionary
2) a method that processes requests and sends responses.
For #1, this is just a property bag that gives you access to the request headers, request stream, response headers, response stream and server data. Think of this as your HttpContext for ASP.NET or HttpListenerContext for System.Net.HttpListener. In fact, in more recent builds of Katana (https://katanaproject.codeplex.com/, which is an open source implementation from the ASP.NET team, there have been improvements (more to come) to simplify this down to an easier to use object model, including an OwinRequest, OwinResponse, and IOwinContext.
For #2, this is often called the "AppFunc" and the signature is:
using AppFunc = Func<IDictionary<string, object>, Task>;
This signature is used for "Middleware" that is in a pipeline of request handlers or it can be the end application which is generating HTML, is a WebAPI, etc.
In Katana, there is a class you can inherit from that simplifies this signature to consume the IOwinContext I mentioned previously. Take at look at OwinMiddlware
You can also read this article which gives an overview of the Katana/OWIN effort: http://www.asp.net/aspnet/overview/owin-and-katana/an-overview-of-project-katana
OWIN just defines how the web server and web application will talk to each other. Your application must implement one side of this contact, the other side which connects to the web server must be provided by installing a NuGet package specific to the web server. There is one for IIS, one for self hosting (stand alone application) etc.
We have a Flex application which relies heavily on data driven content supplied via asp.net. Currently the majority of this data is provided via asp.net objects which are then XML serialised and sent via a simple ASHX handler. This is then parsed via e4x in singleton classes to populate either its self or arrays of sub classes which are then available to the rest of the application without making additional data calls.
This works but is it the best way? I've read quite a few articles discussing the subject but couldn't really find any consensus.
Should I look into converting these to Web Services? If so, how should I manage the bindings, automatically import them via Flex or build my own? What are the pro's and con's. An important factor in this decision is speed, lowest latency and highest throughput is essential
As a separate matter our application doesn't sit at the root of the domain, and when in local development makes data calls to our development servers. As a result we add flash vars to the application to specify the appRoot which is then appended to the service url as necessary.
MyService.url = GeneralData.ApplicationRootUrl + "Services/foobar.ashx";
Is this the best way? I have since discovered the rootURL property, should I be using this, how does it work in this context? If I were to convert the services to web services how would I go about implementing the same functionality to allow local development?
Many thanks
This works but is it the best way?
Best is very subjective based on your situation. If at all possible, I would recommend you use an AMF gateway. That way your objects can immediately convert from server side objects (.NET Classes) to client side objects (AS3 classes). This is a big time savings because you don't have to manually create your XML on the back end, nor manually process it in the front end. Also the binary format of AMF is going to give much smaller packets than XML or a SOAP WebService would.
For .NET AMF options, I'd look into WebORB or FlourineFX
Flex Application is always loaded in browser, and you can use relative URL, so that your application will connect to same server from where it is loaded.
MyService.url = "/Services/foobar.ashx";
"/" will certainly append host where it came from. And it is always good practice to connect to same host where the flash is loaded from.
Secondly, SOAP web services use xml serialization, so if you use your handler to do e4x serialization or you use SOAP web service generator of Flash Builder, speed will be almost same. SOAP web service will certainly be little slower, but the difference will be in micro seconds to milli seconds.
However, with Web services, your development will speed improve as you will not have to create proxy classes.
I have https://mysite/myservice.asmx which is consumed fine with Flashbuilder. When i ported it to https://mysite/myservice.svc, and generate proxy objects, flash proxy objects fails to call any operations. I guess, during web service call, operation contracts are got by https://mysite/myservice.asmx?op=myOp, but in WCF, https://mysite/myservice.svc?op=myOp gives disco file reference. Is there anything done it? Has anyone called WCF from Flex?
It depends on the WCF Config that you have setup, if you provide that I may be able to answer better, but for now try to access the WSDL from https://mysite/myservice.svc?wsdl
Hi I would like to monitor a Java application using the browser but at the same time utilising the existing JMX infrastructure.
I know that JMX provides a HTTP interface but I think it provides a standard web gui and its not possible to mashup its functionality with an existing system.
Are you aware of any REST interface for JMX?
My research on google currently shows that there is one project which does something similar. Is this the only option?
Jolokia is a new (at this time) JMX Agent you can install in your JVM and exposes the MBeanServer over HTTP in JSON format.
Tomcat provides a JMX Proxy Servlet in its Manager Application. I don't think it's exactly REST, but it's stateless and is built from simple HTTP requests, so it should be close enough.
For posterity, I've recently added a little web server to my SimpleJMX package. It exposes beans from the platform MBeanServer to HTTP via Jetty if in the classpath. There is also text versions of all pages that make it easy to scrape.
// create a new JMX server listening on a specific port
JmxServer jmxServer = new JmxServer(8000);
jmxServer.start();
// register any beans to jmx as necessary
jmxServer.register(someObj);
// create a web server publisher listening on a specific port
JmxWebServer jmxWebServer = new JmxWebServer(8080);
jmxWebServer.start();
There's a little test program which shows it in operation. Here's an image of java.lang:type=Memory accessed from a browser. As you can see the output is very basic HTML.
You might want to have a look at jmx4perl. It comes with an agent servlet which proxies REST request to local JMX calls and returns a JSON structure with the answers. It supports read, write, exec, list (list of mbeans) and search operations and knows how to dive into complex data structures via an XPath like expression. Look at the protocol description for more details.
The forthcoming release can deal with bulk (== multiple at once) requests as well and adds the possibility to post a JSON request as alternative to a pure REST GET-request.
In one of the next releases there will support a proxy mode so that no agent servlet needs to be deployed on the target platform, but only on an intermediate, proxy server.
MX4J is another alternative., quoting below from the it's home page -
MX4J is a project to build an Open Source implementation of the Java(TM) Management Extensions (JMX) and of the JMX Remote API (JSR 160) specifications, and to build tools relating to JMX.